With the rise of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies in the industry, it is becoming more and more crucial to have a good understanding of those processes. This leads to a high need for the implementation of a model that can accurately simulate such a process. The difficulties of simulating AM can come from multiple sources. Firstly, from the nature of the process. Indeed, it requires a large deformation thermo-mechanical simulation. Secondly, the modeling of the material law is complex. Lastly, the geometry of the process imposes a very fine discretization (layers can be as small as a few μm). This creates models that are very computationally costly. Moreover, the process requires altering the geometry of the model during simulations to model the addition of matter, which is a computational challenge by itself.
This poster presents the implementation of a three-dimensional thermal Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of AM in the fully implicit in-house Finite Element code “Metafor”. The main focus of the work is on mesh management techniques. The method to activate elements during a simulation is adapted from the element deletion algorithm (erosion method) implemented in Metafor in the scope of crack propagation. The final model is compared against literature results with a good agreement